Everyone hates on the Boomers because things got worse under their watch, but if you look deeply into it, I think they were already living in a decline compared to the peak of their parents and they were just trying to deal with it, just like Millennials and Gen Z are today. Some of the other consequences of the decline ended up looking like they really helped the boomers out.
Plastics really got started in the 1930s, and exploded from there. A lot of the worst excesses we’re seeing are a result of the post-war boom and people trying to keep an unsustainable party going forever.
The PET bottle (of which there are 500 BILLION manufactured every year) was invented in the mid-70s, the US left the gold standard because the government had spent 20 years overspending to stick it to the Soviets and they couldn’t keep the world military industrial complex going without letting debt explode, inflation and gas prices exploded, globalization started sending manufacturing to places that don’t follow the same standards more environmentally conscious nations do, and so on.
The industrial revolution was already arguably 200 years old at that point so it isn’t as if carbon use would have dropped at all in another scenario, but I think a lot of the 15 problems I listed would be a lot less prominent if the so-called “greatest generation” hadn’t pulled out all the stops to keep the party going forever. I guess you could even argue that their parents and grandparents also contributed by making changes to the financial system and so on that sowed the seeds of all the wasteful practices.
The core for me is that by focusing on one and only one problem to the exclusion of all the others, and doing it on a per-country basis the way we have, it’s first of all not helping and often making the many problems worse – The debt problem and many of our waste problems are going to get way worse if we try to consume our way out of the fossil fuel consumption problem, for example, and right now we’re largely just outsourcing our bad practices to other countries that don’t care about it like we do. “We’re net zero now because we have Russia dig up all the fossil fuels for us and we have China process them so our ledger says we didn’t have to use hardly any carbon even though we’re consuming all this”
I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone else who thinks that the die was cast before the boomers and certainly by the time they came of age. I never tire of pointing out that Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher and their cohort and most of their collaborators were not boomers. Nor are Poilievre, Trudeau, Scott Moe and theirs. Boomers are not without blame, but no 20th century generation is.
As a boomer myself, maybe I’m just looking to spread the blame. But in my rural community, it’s the boomers who most reliably argue for environmentalism, debt control, and wealth distribution through public services.
Everyone hates on the Boomers because things got worse under their watch, but if you look deeply into it, I think they were already living in a decline compared to the peak of their parents and they were just trying to deal with it, just like Millennials and Gen Z are today. Some of the other consequences of the decline ended up looking like they really helped the boomers out.
Plastics really got started in the 1930s, and exploded from there. A lot of the worst excesses we’re seeing are a result of the post-war boom and people trying to keep an unsustainable party going forever.
The PET bottle (of which there are 500 BILLION manufactured every year) was invented in the mid-70s, the US left the gold standard because the government had spent 20 years overspending to stick it to the Soviets and they couldn’t keep the world military industrial complex going without letting debt explode, inflation and gas prices exploded, globalization started sending manufacturing to places that don’t follow the same standards more environmentally conscious nations do, and so on.
The industrial revolution was already arguably 200 years old at that point so it isn’t as if carbon use would have dropped at all in another scenario, but I think a lot of the 15 problems I listed would be a lot less prominent if the so-called “greatest generation” hadn’t pulled out all the stops to keep the party going forever. I guess you could even argue that their parents and grandparents also contributed by making changes to the financial system and so on that sowed the seeds of all the wasteful practices.
The core for me is that by focusing on one and only one problem to the exclusion of all the others, and doing it on a per-country basis the way we have, it’s first of all not helping and often making the many problems worse – The debt problem and many of our waste problems are going to get way worse if we try to consume our way out of the fossil fuel consumption problem, for example, and right now we’re largely just outsourcing our bad practices to other countries that don’t care about it like we do. “We’re net zero now because we have Russia dig up all the fossil fuels for us and we have China process them so our ledger says we didn’t have to use hardly any carbon even though we’re consuming all this”
I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone else who thinks that the die was cast before the boomers and certainly by the time they came of age. I never tire of pointing out that Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher and their cohort and most of their collaborators were not boomers. Nor are Poilievre, Trudeau, Scott Moe and theirs. Boomers are not without blame, but no 20th century generation is.
As a boomer myself, maybe I’m just looking to spread the blame. But in my rural community, it’s the boomers who most reliably argue for environmentalism, debt control, and wealth distribution through public services.